Phase II, Day 7: Frustration

What the crap!? I am back up to 214 again this morning. That is exactly where I was on Wednesday! What am I doing wrong?

I am eating the right things and following the book. I only average a few calories over 1200 every day. I am exercising several times a week. I drink four liters or more of water almost every single day.

If I get to Wednesday and haven’t lost anything this week, I don’t know what I’ll do. Go back to Phase I and live on it for the rest of my life? 

I refuse to enter my gain into any of my trackers this morning. I’m going to pretend I didn’t weigh myself at all and hope that it was a fluke. I am working so hard while everybody around me is eating whatever they want and it’s not even making a difference. I want to cry! 

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Update: Just tried going to the gym and feel like a total failure. I did weights for like 10 minutes, then wandered around trying to find a cardio machine I felt like doing. Nothing seemed to fit the bill, so I just left. I feel so defeated.

But I also think I might have found out what’s going on with me, too. I woke up with some familiar cramping this morning. I wrote it off as nothing because I’m on the pill and thus my cycle is quite regular, but I still have cramps. And this thread seems to suggest that women on the pill tend to experience a weird change in their cycles after dropping a bunch of weight at the beginning of the diet. Sounds like me.

This would account for the cramping, the extra weight that suddenly returned, and the depression/restlessness/lethargy I’ve been feeling all morning.

I guess we’ll find out in the next couple of days.

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Update 2: I’m beginning to wonder if my body is actually in starvation mode. I read a great article on what that actually means, which you can find here. The article actually seems to seek to discourage people from thinking that they are in starvation mode simply because they are not losing as fast as they want to, but it actually might apply to me. It says, “A starvation diet does not mean the absence of food. It means cutting the total caloric intake to less than 50% of what the body requires.”

“‘What the body requires” is determined by the basal metabolic rate (the number of calories your body needs to function, what you would burn if you were to lie in bed all day long.) My BMR is 1797.4. My caloric intake, according to my-calorie-counter, averages out at somewhere around 1200 per day - not bad, and right around the 500 calorie deficit I should aim for if I want to lose a pound a week. But my activity averages to about 372 calories per day.

1200 - 372 = 828

828 x 2 = 1656

I am averaging less than 50% of my BMR when exercise is factored in!

So let’s take a vote. Should I:
a) stick it out the way I’ve been doing and see if anything changes
b) eat more calories
c) exercise less

Tell me what you think, faithful readers. I know you are out there!